The Great Flood

A mesmerizing, wordless trip along the Mississippi.

There’s a moment in The Great Flood, a documentary
about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, when a woman being evacuated
wades through knee-deep water. Her hair mussed and her clothes soaked to
the waist, she pauses to pick a flower. As she turns to the camera, we
can see her smile. We can almost hear her laugh.

It’s one of many
moments in this wordless documentary that’s so lovely it’s almost
disconcerting. The film, by Bill Morrison, patches together archival
footage and sets it to a spellbinding original score by guitarist Bill
Frisell. There’s plenty here that recalls Katrina or Sandy in its
harrowing imagery: the near-oceanic swelling of the river, the
demolished towns, the crowded tent cities. But in illustrating the
magnitude of the most destructive river flood in U.S. history—it covered
27,000 square miles and displaced more than 1 million people—The Great Flood
is cinematic testament not only to the sheer power of the natural
world, but to the indomitability of the human spirit. That’s a daunting
task, yet the film achieves it not through weepy voice-over narration,
image manipulation or an overwrought, disaster-porn soundtrack. Instead,
we get a bluesy, slightly dissonant reverb tracking shots of wrecked
streets, the sign for “ABLE HOTEL” quietly reflected in a vast puddle.
At other times, the score turns jazzy and jaunty, as when a
binocular-wielding Herbert Hoover swings through for photo ops with
floodplain refugees, or when a trumpet yowls wistfully as uprooted
Southerners—many of them former sharecroppers—decamp for the industrial
North. The film stock is scorched or splotchy in places, adding an
appealing, staticky glow.

Most interestingly, The Great Flood
provokes questions about how we react to such calamity. As you watch a
woman matter-of-factly get a haircut, deluge be damned, or a man play
piano at a tent settlement, you can’t help but compare them to the much
more demonstrative disaster victims on 24-hour cable TV news. Just watch
the faces of men stacking sandbags, looking incredulous and slightly
insulted that they’re being filmed. There’s no wailing into the camera
here, no sensationalistic melodrama.

Am I aestheticizing
these survivors as paragons of resiliency belonging to a bygone time?
Some have criticized the film for presenting suffering as quaint. That’s
misguided. This is 80 minutes of audiovisual poetry at its most
sublime, and its most vital.